Dec 20, 2022Liked by Kat Murti, Akiva Malamet, Shikha Dalmia
It's amazing how libertarian men can clearly see the pitfalls and danger in relying on government, even government run with the best of intentions, and then still argue that women should happily give up their freedoms to live in a state of dependency.
Dec 21, 2022Liked by Kat Murti, Akiva Malamet, Shikha Dalmia
Bryan is a brilliant thinker with a blind spot when it comes to the sexes. Have you read his “libertarian” defense of coverture? He argues that women in the 1870s, despite poverty and lack of rights, enjoyed more freedom than women today.
I guess he didn’t include this strange argument in his latest book, but it is well worth eviscerating.
“We expect men to be stoic and chivalrous—to gladly and silently sacrifice for the sake of women...” Really? What about all the whining, bitching, and moaning from the men who stoically describe themselves as "incels"? I guess it's got something to do with luck.
Despite generally appreciating this article, especially its reliance on data (something Caplan doesn't do), I snorted at this:
"that men are less likely to get custody of their children and more likely to pay child support in the event of divorce, that they spend more time at the office and less time with their children, that they face higher suicide rates, that they are more likely to be employed in manual labor, and even the prevalence of prison rape—are, in fact, issues that modern feminists do identify as problems and have discussed at great length."
Are these "feminists" in the room with you now? Can others see them?
Because I know many, many men who have had their children stolen from them by divorce courts and I have yet to find a feminist who has a peep to say about that. See, e.g., Julie Bindel (whom I otherwise greatly respect), who jeers at fathers wanting their children back, but is outraged when the same standard is applied to women in, e.g., Dubai.
You can all all the above "patriarchy". Fine. But if so, it's the part of patriarchy that is perfectly fine for feminists.
That just means feminists are human beings, with the human tendency to be very much in favour of equality when it means getting your share of the good stuff (e.g. liberty, security), and being more quiet when it comes to accepting your share of the tough stuff (e.g. responsibility).
I think I really got very lost at the beginning. So Caplan's argument about the True Meaning of feminism is that everyone agrees on equality, but not everyone agrees on feminism, indicating that a lot of people don't equate feminism with equality. I don't feel like that central argument ever got refuted? It just showed that a majority of people liked feminism - but that doesn't mean isn't not true that "A basic premise of feminism is that women have it worse than men". I'm not sure how that part was ever contradicted.
To me, I never end up calling myself a feminist not because I think there's a True Meaning that I don't agree with, but *because* there doesn't seem to be one feminism, only multiple, competing Feminisms, and some that don't even have the decency to distinguish themselves. In reality, my actual beliefs aren't all that distant from the majority of mainstream feminists, but I've been too exposed to the unmainstream for too long and too involved in those un-mainstream subcultures to be able to easily label myself a feminist at all.
"Unfortunately, Caplan’s is not such an exercise. Packaging this volume as a strident—and as it turns out—ill-considered attack on feminism may curry favor with the rising tide of angry populist men who culturally align with the right, but seems unlikely to actually convert the many nativists among them to becoming immigration advocates. Meanwhile, as with many similar overtures to the Alt-Right/NRX/Manosphere and other fundamentally illiberal audiences, it’s far more likely to alienate a large segment of the population that might otherwise be attracted to Caplan’s broader ideas about the benefits of immigration and free enterprise. And, in doing so, Caplan is likely to exacerbate rather than defuse our angry cultural divide."
And how would he defuse our angry cultural divide? Let me guess: by agreeing entirely with the views of one side.
Excellent takedown book review. I was a libertarian in my thirties and forties, but I began to change my mind after the fall of the Berlin Wall, and then the Iraq war. Now I look at the fact that a lot of the libertarian literature I was reading was financed by the Koch brothers. I look at the fact that many libertarians supported Trump, eg. Peter Thiel.... and that the populist right is joined at the hip with fossil fuel companies, and I see a big problem. Why is feminism important here? To me it is not a coincidence that reactionaries everywhere are rabidly anti-feminist. We just witnessed the U.S. Supreme Court overturning Roe vs. Wade on flimsy grounds. We see that fascists everywhere absolutely despise feminism: Putin, Orban, Modi, Rush Limbaugh, Alex Jones..... What comes to mind is the fascistic emphasis on militarism, exhaltation of masculine strength, gun ownership, and good old-fashioned violence and mysogyny. It's not a coincidence that Alex Jones hawks testosterone supplements - men who are drawn to fascism are men who are insecure about their masculinity. So how does libertarianism fit in all this? I've thought about this, and to my mind the connection is social darwinism. In a minimal libertarian state, with a minimum or non-existent social safety net, people will fall by the wayside. If you accept the libertarian idea that the state has no responsibility to support the downtrodden, then you basically have to inure yourself to the unpleasant reality of people dying in the street, and one way to do that is the fascist and populist way of demonizing entire groups of people, including and especially feminists.
> Right off the bat, Caplan dismisses the definition of feminism embraced by most self-identifying feminists, namely, that men and women should be treated equally.
Because it doesn't hold up. If feminism stems from belief that men and women should be treated equally, then feminists would be advocating for policy which accomplishes this.
It simply does not happen. What happens is advocating for policy which addresses unequal (disadvantageous) treatment of women, compared to men. At best!
What does not happen is the opposite. Conscription is a thing in most first-world countries. It includes women in only a few. Men could have their freedom stripped away, and then be sent off to die. What could outweigh such injustice?
"Feminism" is about concerns of women. It should be obvious. Just look at the word itself. And as for the definition, well, Google states this: "the advocacy of women's rights on the basis of the equality of the sexes.". Advocacy of women's rights. Not advocacy of making rights equal.
I brought up conscription b/c I live in Poland, and recently someone not in the military got called for mandatory military exercises. Why did it happen? Because, turns out, MPs voted unanimously for it. Including left-wing. Below is a Twitter exchange with one of left-wing MPs, who was asked why they voted for it:
> @KorolukM: I pay mandatory taxes and expect the government to ensure my defense from that, not treat me like potential cannon meat. If it's not enough, I can pay more.
> If you like the state shitting into your face, then by all means, no kink shaming. But don't throw that shit at others.
> @AM_Zukowska: That is, how exactly, with whom is it to provide defense? Someone has to serve in the army and in case of war the state has to have trained conscripts. Sorry. Ideally, wars would not exist. But there have been wars since the dawn of mankind.
> @nalu__xx: For you to write such a thing.... Well, I won't say that I'm not disappointed
> @AM_Zukowska: I wrote that, because I feel responsible for the country.
> @MoistureBusters: And is Private Anna-Maria going for training too?
> @AM_Zukowska: I do not have a military qualification. I think that, unfortunately, with an eye defect of -7 diopters and retinal detachment I would not get one.
> @Vimis23: So then what do you think, compulsory service for men and women? What do you say to that? Everyone for conscription. Equality is equality.
> @AM_Zukowska: There has been no compulsory conscription for anyone since 2009. Military service is voluntary. There are, however, military exercises for those with a Category A military qualification. Since 2014, they are no longer only for reserve soldiers, because since 2009 we have less and less reserve.
> While **we demand recognition and equal rights, we don't want an equal share of the harms** produced by patriarchy. We want those harms to be none - or at least less.
> The argument "women, now you have what you wanted, now go to war" is in fact a misunderstanding of the flagship assumptions of the drive towards emancipation.
> No - the fact that a woman becomes a soldier, even a General, is not a celebration for feminism.
> **half-witted expectation that women should join** it [army] willingly, with a smile on their lips and male anointment, is nonsense.
> If the war escalates, it will force many men and women to adopt defensive measures no matter what their willingness or reluctance to armed conflict.
(Well no, presumably women will be allowed to leave the country and men not, just as in Ukraine. Ofc this blatant, sickening inequality was pretty much ignored. Why?)
----
It's funny how "feminism is just about gender equality" is supposed to be an all-powerful shield for the feminists, while MRM - "Men's rights movement", gets the following treatment on Wikipedia:
> the movement, and sectors of the movement, have been described by scholars and commentators as misogynistic,[3][4][5] hateful,[6][5][7] and, in some cases, as advocating violence against women
Since I admire Caplan's writings about migration and follow him on Substack, I do find this book review as important criticism showing that even Caplan despite all of good behaviours and arguments still has his flaws and problems in debate.
Caplan has a marked habit of ignoring any information that is difficult, complex or runs against his views. This was particularly evident in his comic book "Open Borders".
Which this writer seems to endorse. Tip: if someone will be dishonest when he agrees with you, he'll be dishonest when he disagrees with you.
Because a tenured professor is a kind of elevated spiritual person who by that mere circumstance couldn't possibly be attracted by the idea of a larger pile of chips. How could anyone even entertain the idea.
It's amazing how libertarian men can clearly see the pitfalls and danger in relying on government, even government run with the best of intentions, and then still argue that women should happily give up their freedoms to live in a state of dependency.
Thank you for taking the time to read and critique Caplan’s book, Kat.
Bryan is a brilliant thinker with a blind spot when it comes to the sexes. Have you read his “libertarian” defense of coverture? He argues that women in the 1870s, despite poverty and lack of rights, enjoyed more freedom than women today.
I guess he didn’t include this strange argument in his latest book, but it is well worth eviscerating.
https://www.econlib.org/archives/2010/04/how_free_were_1.html
“We expect men to be stoic and chivalrous—to gladly and silently sacrifice for the sake of women...” Really? What about all the whining, bitching, and moaning from the men who stoically describe themselves as "incels"? I guess it's got something to do with luck.
Despite generally appreciating this article, especially its reliance on data (something Caplan doesn't do), I snorted at this:
"that men are less likely to get custody of their children and more likely to pay child support in the event of divorce, that they spend more time at the office and less time with their children, that they face higher suicide rates, that they are more likely to be employed in manual labor, and even the prevalence of prison rape—are, in fact, issues that modern feminists do identify as problems and have discussed at great length."
Are these "feminists" in the room with you now? Can others see them?
Because I know many, many men who have had their children stolen from them by divorce courts and I have yet to find a feminist who has a peep to say about that. See, e.g., Julie Bindel (whom I otherwise greatly respect), who jeers at fathers wanting their children back, but is outraged when the same standard is applied to women in, e.g., Dubai.
You can all all the above "patriarchy". Fine. But if so, it's the part of patriarchy that is perfectly fine for feminists.
That just means feminists are human beings, with the human tendency to be very much in favour of equality when it means getting your share of the good stuff (e.g. liberty, security), and being more quiet when it comes to accepting your share of the tough stuff (e.g. responsibility).
I think I really got very lost at the beginning. So Caplan's argument about the True Meaning of feminism is that everyone agrees on equality, but not everyone agrees on feminism, indicating that a lot of people don't equate feminism with equality. I don't feel like that central argument ever got refuted? It just showed that a majority of people liked feminism - but that doesn't mean isn't not true that "A basic premise of feminism is that women have it worse than men". I'm not sure how that part was ever contradicted.
To me, I never end up calling myself a feminist not because I think there's a True Meaning that I don't agree with, but *because* there doesn't seem to be one feminism, only multiple, competing Feminisms, and some that don't even have the decency to distinguish themselves. In reality, my actual beliefs aren't all that distant from the majority of mainstream feminists, but I've been too exposed to the unmainstream for too long and too involved in those un-mainstream subcultures to be able to easily label myself a feminist at all.
"Unfortunately, Caplan’s is not such an exercise. Packaging this volume as a strident—and as it turns out—ill-considered attack on feminism may curry favor with the rising tide of angry populist men who culturally align with the right, but seems unlikely to actually convert the many nativists among them to becoming immigration advocates. Meanwhile, as with many similar overtures to the Alt-Right/NRX/Manosphere and other fundamentally illiberal audiences, it’s far more likely to alienate a large segment of the population that might otherwise be attracted to Caplan’s broader ideas about the benefits of immigration and free enterprise. And, in doing so, Caplan is likely to exacerbate rather than defuse our angry cultural divide."
And how would he defuse our angry cultural divide? Let me guess: by agreeing entirely with the views of one side.
Excellent takedown book review. I was a libertarian in my thirties and forties, but I began to change my mind after the fall of the Berlin Wall, and then the Iraq war. Now I look at the fact that a lot of the libertarian literature I was reading was financed by the Koch brothers. I look at the fact that many libertarians supported Trump, eg. Peter Thiel.... and that the populist right is joined at the hip with fossil fuel companies, and I see a big problem. Why is feminism important here? To me it is not a coincidence that reactionaries everywhere are rabidly anti-feminist. We just witnessed the U.S. Supreme Court overturning Roe vs. Wade on flimsy grounds. We see that fascists everywhere absolutely despise feminism: Putin, Orban, Modi, Rush Limbaugh, Alex Jones..... What comes to mind is the fascistic emphasis on militarism, exhaltation of masculine strength, gun ownership, and good old-fashioned violence and mysogyny. It's not a coincidence that Alex Jones hawks testosterone supplements - men who are drawn to fascism are men who are insecure about their masculinity. So how does libertarianism fit in all this? I've thought about this, and to my mind the connection is social darwinism. In a minimal libertarian state, with a minimum or non-existent social safety net, people will fall by the wayside. If you accept the libertarian idea that the state has no responsibility to support the downtrodden, then you basically have to inure yourself to the unpleasant reality of people dying in the street, and one way to do that is the fascist and populist way of demonizing entire groups of people, including and especially feminists.
> Right off the bat, Caplan dismisses the definition of feminism embraced by most self-identifying feminists, namely, that men and women should be treated equally.
Because it doesn't hold up. If feminism stems from belief that men and women should be treated equally, then feminists would be advocating for policy which accomplishes this.
It simply does not happen. What happens is advocating for policy which addresses unequal (disadvantageous) treatment of women, compared to men. At best!
What does not happen is the opposite. Conscription is a thing in most first-world countries. It includes women in only a few. Men could have their freedom stripped away, and then be sent off to die. What could outweigh such injustice?
"Feminism" is about concerns of women. It should be obvious. Just look at the word itself. And as for the definition, well, Google states this: "the advocacy of women's rights on the basis of the equality of the sexes.". Advocacy of women's rights. Not advocacy of making rights equal.
I brought up conscription b/c I live in Poland, and recently someone not in the military got called for mandatory military exercises. Why did it happen? Because, turns out, MPs voted unanimously for it. Including left-wing. Below is a Twitter exchange with one of left-wing MPs, who was asked why they voted for it:
Link to these tweets (but I translated them below too), @AM_Zukowska is the MP: https://twitter.com/am_zukowska/status/1600474082163580928
TL;DR: "Someone has to".
> @KorolukM: I pay mandatory taxes and expect the government to ensure my defense from that, not treat me like potential cannon meat. If it's not enough, I can pay more.
> If you like the state shitting into your face, then by all means, no kink shaming. But don't throw that shit at others.
> @AM_Zukowska: That is, how exactly, with whom is it to provide defense? Someone has to serve in the army and in case of war the state has to have trained conscripts. Sorry. Ideally, wars would not exist. But there have been wars since the dawn of mankind.
> @nalu__xx: For you to write such a thing.... Well, I won't say that I'm not disappointed
> @AM_Zukowska: I wrote that, because I feel responsible for the country.
> @MoistureBusters: And is Private Anna-Maria going for training too?
> @AM_Zukowska: I do not have a military qualification. I think that, unfortunately, with an eye defect of -7 diopters and retinal detachment I would not get one.
> @Vimis23: So then what do you think, compulsory service for men and women? What do you say to that? Everyone for conscription. Equality is equality.
> @AM_Zukowska: There has been no compulsory conscription for anyone since 2009. Military service is voluntary. There are, however, military exercises for those with a Category A military qualification. Since 2014, they are no longer only for reserve soldiers, because since 2009 we have less and less reserve.
Also, an article written by a feminist, in largest (I think) left-wing publication in the country (written in Polish): https://krytykapolityczna.pl/kraj/feminizm-wojsko-pobor-cwiczenia/
Here's link to my comment, where I translated the whole thing: https://www.themotte.org/post/229/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/42022?context=8
Below, only some fragments, for taste:
> While **we demand recognition and equal rights, we don't want an equal share of the harms** produced by patriarchy. We want those harms to be none - or at least less.
> The argument "women, now you have what you wanted, now go to war" is in fact a misunderstanding of the flagship assumptions of the drive towards emancipation.
> No - the fact that a woman becomes a soldier, even a General, is not a celebration for feminism.
> **half-witted expectation that women should join** it [army] willingly, with a smile on their lips and male anointment, is nonsense.
> If the war escalates, it will force many men and women to adopt defensive measures no matter what their willingness or reluctance to armed conflict.
(Well no, presumably women will be allowed to leave the country and men not, just as in Ukraine. Ofc this blatant, sickening inequality was pretty much ignored. Why?)
----
It's funny how "feminism is just about gender equality" is supposed to be an all-powerful shield for the feminists, while MRM - "Men's rights movement", gets the following treatment on Wikipedia:
> the movement, and sectors of the movement, have been described by scholars and commentators as misogynistic,[3][4][5] hateful,[6][5][7] and, in some cases, as advocating violence against women
Since I admire Caplan's writings about migration and follow him on Substack, I do find this book review as important criticism showing that even Caplan despite all of good behaviours and arguments still has his flaws and problems in debate.
Caplan has a marked habit of ignoring any information that is difficult, complex or runs against his views. This was particularly evident in his comic book "Open Borders".
Which this writer seems to endorse. Tip: if someone will be dishonest when he agrees with you, he'll be dishonest when he disagrees with you.
Because a tenured professor is a kind of elevated spiritual person who by that mere circumstance couldn't possibly be attracted by the idea of a larger pile of chips. How could anyone even entertain the idea.
Nice review, a couple of nits:
"Yet, Caplan inists..." I think that should be "insists".
This quote didn't make sense to me “‘I’m not one of those feminists’ strategy works. Use it...” are some words missing, perchance?